Art is work. Work takes time.

I know I've been banging my head against this wall for a while, but now I have references!

Reading time: approximately 12 minutes

Hello hello hello my darlings! 💖

I’m just back late last night from a stressful trip caring for an ill family member, which came after a stressful week where a number of processes in my life randomly broke down. I’m in the middle of Clarion West’s Flash Fiction Workshop again this year, making me on the hook for producing five stories in six weeks (and giving feedback on something like 30 stories to my workshop cohort). The deadline for the first story flew by me yesterday.

In my head I had imagined being mostly done with my story by this point? In my optimistic fantasy, I had found little pieces of scattered time to write the story on my trip. I’d come home with story done and ready to jump into the next like a story ninja! Also in-between writing sessions I was planning I’d deep the clean the whole house this week top to bottom.

Reality: It’s just past noon and I’m sitting on the couch in my PJ’s recovering from 2 days of heat exhaustion and 1.5 weeks of intense stress, carefully trying to stay hydrated and pick foods that won’t freak out my gastric & nervous systems, both of which are absolutely done with me and my shenanigans.

All that, but also, I’m having a coalescing of ideas that I really want to share with you.

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On my trip I was reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, which I thought would tell me that I should do less and focus more, which I already know, but maybe if a book told me to do it, I’d actually listen. And he is saying that, but along with that he’s defining terms that elucidate things about the state of being a writer that I’ve never been able to put my finger on before but drive me crazy. And he’s going in detail on strategies to limit the crazy that writing (and all knowledge work) makes.

Just look at this, my darlings:

Professional writers, in some sense, were the original remote workers, and what you find when you study their habits, I noted, is that they often go way out of their way to find somewhere—anywhere—to work that’s not inside their own homes. Even if it meant putting up with the clanging hammers of a furnace repair shop.

The problem is that the home is filled with the familiar, and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly. When we pass the laundry basket outside our home office (aka our bedroom), our brain shifts toward a household-chores context, even when we would like to maintain focus on whatever pressing work needs to get done. This phenomenon is a consequence of the associative nature of our brains. Because the laundry basket is embedded in a thick, stress-inducing matrix of under-attended household tasks, it creates what the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin describes as “a traffic jam of neural nodes trying to get through to consciousness.” In this context, work tumbles forward as one stress-inducing demand among many.

This is why Benchley retreated to the furnace factory and McCullough to his garden shed. They sought a more advantageous mental space to produce meaningful work. By calming their relational-memory system, they could slow their perception of time and allow their attention to mold itself more completely around a singular pursuit.

Newport, Cal. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (p. 159). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

At long last, a cogent answer to my husband’s somewhat exasperated question: “Yes, why do you keep letting housework get in the way of your real work?” And an answer to why I feel like I want to run away from home to work every chance I (never) get.

I’m already excited to pick out the helpful strategies in it one by one and apply them to my working life. So that work will actually happen in a normal, non-stressful, regular manner. Just typing out that sentence lowered my heart rate.

Cal talks about what he calls pseudo-productivity, the act of essentially looking busy because in this new age of modern office work there is no valid measure of productivity. Managers and workers have internalized this fake measure of productivity, and we have collectively learned to substitute it for actions that lead to actual productivity. Cal argues that the kind of work that has impact—that brings new ideas and forms and breakthroughs to the world, that is beloved and meaningful, our magnum opuses—require deep, sustained work spread out (unevenly) over years. Pseudo-productivity (and, I’d argue, social media algorithms) is keeping us from getting to these works.

Reading this book has been a deeply validating experience. Not only in understanding some of the origin of my crazymaking inability to consistently get work done, but also in my new process, which slows my writing down a lot. Or perhaps just formalizes and acknowledges the “staring out the window” time as writing. Which is working SO well for me. It’s even helping me understand story on a deeper level. Except in practice….in practice, I keep not finishing. I started trying out this new story writing process in March and it’s June and I’ve started three stories but haven’t finished one.

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One I started because I committed to write a story for an anthology by June. At the end of May I had researched and planned and outlined and analyzed and had built a step-by-step process I really enjoyed. I had written the first beat of the first scene. But then it was time to sign up for the Flash Fiction Workshop. And how do I adapt this process to writing a story a week? In somewhat of a panic I dropped work on the first story (which had its deadline pushed back anyway) and started to scheme out how to keep what I love about my process and….streamline it?

This was the start of story two, half a battle plan and half specific research on an actual story. I labored on prep for two weeks before I realized there was no way this process would be successful for the workshop. I shelved the whole mess and frantically came up with a new scheme: I’d look at the workshop stories as exercises. I’d pull cards from the Story Engine decks I’d bought, trump up some awful plot & characters & setting as fast as I could, and invest more time in the elements of story that I want to learn how to do well: the emotional arc, reversals / turns, and the turnstile of mysteries.

That was how I started story 3 last week, except the plot & character & setting aren’t awful, they’re actually kind of magical. And getting to focus on the subtler elements of craft more closely while drafting brings me the kind of joy that got me into this whole writing thing in the first place.

Are you seeing the problem here?

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I’ve been wondering for a while about Natalie Wynn. I’ve been a patron of hers on Patreon for years now. And I can’t put my finger on why.

I kind of hate the idea of paid subscriptions, to be honest? Because everything is a subscription now and I do not have infinite money to personally support all the artists that I’d love to support. Or, let me put it in another way: I wish I could take all the money I am paying out in subscription services to companies for things that used to be and should be a one-time payment and put that money toward subscriptions that support artists instead. Subscription fatigue is totally a thing.

But I will pay every month—gleefully—knowing that means another ContraPoints video will exist for me to watch. Even though she doesn’t make them every month. Even when she was burnt out for a year and didn’t produce anything I was happy to pay and support her because I knew she would get through it and produce a video again that I loved.

I watch lots of other YouTubers and find them entertaining. I love their videos. But I don’t feel like I need to sign up for their Patreons. Why? Natalie has video essays just for Patreons (they are exactly like her YouTube essays, just with less makeup, costuming, and set design), but that is the only bonus. There’s no newsletter or photo dumps or livestreams or even social media interaction, and I like that just fine.

Let’s be clear—I think the other YouTubers I watch deserve to be paid for their content! Art is work! I’m trying to figure out exactly what makes Natalie’s work so compelling to me I won’t hesitate to fund a complete stranger in the hopes of seeing more of her work. I continue funding her even though I know she has plenty of funding from many sources at this point and my tiny contribution is not particularly relevant. Aspiring authors who have worked many years without funding would like to know her secret!!!!

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We’re back to me on my couch, nursing a SmartWater and trying to talk myself into being productive (crazymaking, I tell you) and I am sucked into YouTube. Adam Conover is interviewing Natalie Wynn on his podcast Factually!. Several times in the interview, Adam remarks on how deeply Natalie goes into her topics. They talk about her most recent YouTube video, a 3-hour epic titled “Twilight,” where she talks about, as Adam puts it: “you cover everything from the nature of desire to sadomasochism to radical feminism and you end with this incredible insight about the nature of masculine and feminine and them containing each other.”

Then this exchange happened (at about the 45-minute mark):

Adam: At one point I believe there’a a graphic on the screen that says—or maybe you say this out loud—that you made this video instead of writing a PhD dissertation and at that moment I realized…wait, yeah, this is that dense of a philosophical work. There is that many citations of other thinkers. You’re doing that much original thinking—I mean there’s a huge number of philosophy videos on YouTube that are just summarizing. And that’s wonderful for them to summarize. That’s essentially what I feel I do as a comic. I read a bunch of ideas and I summarize them for you, in a way that is funny and intelligible. I make it go down easy and hopefully I get a couple of my ideas in there too…But at the end of this video I was like, put this in a fucking library somewhere, because people need to keep watching it and understand exactly what point you’re making, and put it into dialogue with other philosophers or psychologists or thinkers. I mean, how do you think about the work that way?

Natalie: This video—more than my other videos—was like…I did so much research. I think I read at least 100 books for this. And then also a lot of articles and things. I tried to get very familiar with a wide range of thinking about the topics I wanted to cover, and use that to build what’s basically a three hour argument of what I wanted to say. That I think is more academic than most of the stuff I do on YouTube, in the sense that the citations are very wide and there’s a lot of them….I’m just hoping that I presented this in a way that was not just for an academic audience, but would be for a popular audience….

Adam: …It really struck me with this video that you are doing work one would strive to do in an academic setting. I have to imagine that there are people in grad school, or philosophy professors, who are thinking, my God I wish my ideas were able to get 3.7 million views…

Natalie went on to talk about how she really wanted to go back to her academic roots for this video, and return to some of the seminal texts she read in grad school. Adam asks her more about her process. How do you take 100 books and a pile of articles and make them into a three hour argument?

Natalie: My methods for making this video were actually so crazy that I can never do this again because it took so long.

Adam: How long did this take you all together, by the way? How long were you working on this?

Natalie: I think I started it in like June 2022 then published in March 2024. So wow like more than a year and a half. I mean I was working on other things in between… I have a document on my computer that has more than 100,000 words of quotes and notes stuffed into it….There’s probably a more efficient way to use time, which I am trying to do, because I don’t want to just make one video every year and a half. So I’ve got to find ways to be a little more efficient. But for this one project I just felt like really committing to the bookish element of it. So I made a one-time commitment to put in a year’s worth of research…

She goes on to talk about how unsustainable her process is. Adam, also a YouTuber, talks about how he feels the same push and pull between spending the time that you want on a piece and getting it out. They both say they feel like: wouldn’t it have been better for my numbers to have put out 12 more videos in that period of time?

And all I can think is, this is exactly what Cal Newport is saying. We’re all so indoctrinated into the cult of busyness, we’re all so rewarded by the algorithm when we make constant content drops. We’ve been tricked into thinking that we can’t take the time.

But we yearn to do that deep work. And 3.4 million views says we just as much yearn to savor the end result.

That’s the thing that makes me give Natalie my money. Because I love that she puts in the research, obsesses over her art, and—anxiously if she must—takes the time to make it as entertaining and thoughtful and illuminating and fun as she possibly can. For herself and her audience. I love that. For her. And, I’ve realized, I love that for me.

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I’m feeling better now, and it is past time to take a shower. I’ve got a story to finish. And, I guess it’ll take what it takes. Maybe I need the whole workshop to create this one 1500 word story. Maybe it’ll take even longer! Or maybe if I am able to keep some pseudo-productivity at bay it will only take a couple days. All I know is I have to stop falling for the trap of deadlines that don’t serve my process. I have to stop committing to external deadlines that make me panic and wail in my heart. I have to stop committing to self-imposed deadlines in a fit of over-planning that makes me feel temporarily high then frustrated at myself.

Art is work.

Work takes time.

💖 💖 💖,

Elnora